Nearly 23 political parties from the opposition bloc had moved the Supreme Court amid the 2019 Lok Sabha election cycle seeking physical count of up to 50% VVPATs per constituency. The SC had then mandated verification of VVPAT slips in five polling stations per assembly segment. The INDIA bloc now demands a 100% EVM-VVPAT match. The demand has already been preceded by a recent case in the Supreme Court, just like in 2019.
100% COUNT DEMAND
The implications of a 100% count are considerable.
Factor this: The 2019 SC order mandated physical counting of VVPAT slips of five EVMs in each assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency which meant 20,687 polling stations in 2019 Lok Sabha polls and amounted to nearly 2% verification.
EC assessments of 2019 showed that even this 2% verification stretched counting time by five hours or more. A 100% verification is bound to stretch final counting into days, reminiscent of the ballot paper era. An army of independent observers will be needed for this.The ECI recently submitted to the Supreme Court that any such move would be tantamount to “going back indirectly to the days of manual voting using paper ballots”. The ECI said that any such move would be a long drawn, manual process bringing in possibility of human manipulation once again.EVM POLITICS
The issue of EVM credibility and VVPAT auditing has been raised repeatedly by many political parties.
During the August 27, 2018 meeting that EC had with all political parties, almost the entire opposition had joined hands with the Congress to demand a return to ballot paper based voting rather than EVMs. Many political parties suggested that VVPAT counting must be upped — from one polling booth per constituency to 10%-30% VVPATs in a constituency.
The Congress had gone to the Supreme Court with leaders Kamal Nath and Sachin Pilot demanding VVPAT slip verification in at least 10% randomly selected polling stations in each Assembly constituency. AAP demanded 20% auditing per constituency. The matter closed at that time with a 2% verification as mandated by the SC in 2019.
EVM-VVPAT REPORT CARD
The EC stoutly defends the EVM-VVPAT combination. It told SC this year that since the introduction of VVPATs, over 118 crore voters have cast their vote and only 25 complaints have been received and all were found to be false.
It said ballot slips of 38,156 randomly selected VVPAT have been tallied with the electric counts of their Counting Units (CUs) till date and “not a single case of transfer of vote meant for candidate ‘A’ to candidate ‘B’ has been detected”. The poll panel has claimed that any count difference found was due to ‘human error’ such as non-deletion of mock poll votes from the CU or non-removal of mock poll VVPAT slips from VVPAT and “well established protocols” are in place to handle such eventualities in a transparent manner.
